If Miss Means Respectably Unmarried,

Mother Is In Herself A Concrete Denial Of The Idea Of Sexual Pleasure Since Her Sexuality Has Been Placed At The Service Of Reproductive Function Alone. She Is The Perpetually Violated Passive Principle; Her Autonomy Has Been Sufficiently Eroded By The Presence Within Her Of The Embryo She Brought To Term. Her Unthinking Ability To Reproduce, Which Is Her Pride, Is, Since It Is Beyond Choice, Not A Specific Virtue Of Her Own.

Spindly Branches Of Buttercups Were Secreted Among Gleaming Stems Still Moist At The Roots From Last Night's Rain That Had Washedand Refreshed The Entire Wood, Had Dowered It In Poignant Transparency, The Unique, Inconsolable Quality Of Rainy Countries, As If All Was Glimpsed Through Tears.

And Each Stroke Of His Tongue Ripped Off Skin After Successive Skin, All The Skins Of A Life In The World, And Left Behind A Nascent Patina Of Shining Hairs. My Earrings Turned Back To Water And Trickled Down My Shoulders; I Shrugged The Drops Off My Beautiful Fur.

My Paternal Grandmother Would Not Light A Fire On The Sabbath And Piled All Sunday's Washing-up In A Bucket, To Be Dealt With On Monday Morning, Because The Sabbath Was A Day Of Rest--a Practice That Made My Paternal Grandfather, The Village Atheist, As Mad As Fire. Nevertheless, He Willed Five Quid To The Minister, Just To Be On The Safe Side.

It May Be The First In What I Trust Will Be A Rapidly Growing And Influential Genre--the Novel Designed On Purpose To Be Excludedfrom The Booker Short-list.